Not quite live from New York.

My apologies for the radio silence over the last few days, but in a sequence of events disturbingly similar to that of my return from Italy a couple years ago, I managed to come back from NYC with a terrible cold. Fortunately, numerous doctors have determined that the best possible treatment for a head cold is exposure to the dramatic changes in air pressure aboard a commercial airline flight, followed by massive doses of pollen, so when I hit the ground in Atlanta yesterday I was right as rain!

Uh, not really. Actually I'm at the point now where my head feels like it's stuffed with cotton and I'm kind of getting winded just typing this. But anyway, here are some of the photos I took in the Big Apple, with commentary as necessary.


A Tibetan guy -- at least, my best guess is he was Tibetan -- playing the violin and several other instruments at Bethesda Terrace in Central Park.


Ice skaters at Rockefeller Center, about two days before the weather shot up into the 70s. Unfortunately we didn't see Tina Fey or Alec Baldwin at the Rock, but we did have a great time watching the same three or four kids bust their asses on the ice over and over and over again. To their credit, though, they didn't cry or whine about it, they just got right back up and went at it again. For that I salute them.


A Chewbacca made out of Legos at the FAO Schwarz on 5th Avenue.


You can't really tell, but this guy was playing his car stereo really loud with the windows down and playing the maracas as he drove his Saab down 8th Street.


We spent nearly an entire day at the Museum of Modern Art, which I can't remember ever having been to before, and I got to see my favorite painting, Salvador Dali's The Persistence of Memory.


I also liked this one, René Magritte's The Empire of Light II. Surprisingly, I understood it without having seen The Empire of Light I or The Empire of Light III: The Empire Strikes Back.


Yves Klein's Blue Monochrome. I don't know why I took a picture of this, I just thought that was a really cool shade of blue, and according to the museum's catalog Klein worked with a chemist to come up with it.


And finally, the "concrete canyon" of 6th Avenue.

I won't show you any pictures of the fake designer goods I bought in Chinatown . . . because, uh, I didn't buy anything like that, that would be wrong. Although we did think it would've been funny to walk into the Prada store across from Trump Plaza on 5th and ask them where the fake stuff was.

Regular blogging to resume shortly.